Melissa Sollich

Scientists reconstructed a molecule’s full three-dimensional electron wavefunction using a laboratory system instead of a large synchrotron facility. A new algorithm produced reliable orbital images from as few as four photon energies, cutting the required measurement time to eight hours. The method could eventually record femtosecond-scale changes in molecules, but the current experiment captured only static orbitals. A molecule’s electron cloud is not a fuzzy picture of where particles sit.